


through rotting trees and toadstool rings

by TheTartWitch



Series: One-shots of AUs [17]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Allison is a wild child, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Aromantic Allison, F/M, Hunters kill Stiles' mother, King of Fae Stiles, So Stiles takes retribution, Stiles is fae, Stiles raising Allison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-23 04:48:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9641363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: There are many things Kate set out to do by setting the Hale House on fire.This probably wasn't one of them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for fun/sans beta. So if there are any spelling/grammar/punctuation mistakes, it's because sometimes I check stuff seventy times and don't catch them and there isn't a second pair of eyes over here.

When Stiles’ people speak of the Hales, it’s mostly comments on Talia Hale’s Favored status and how the family plants herbs for the fae on the edges of their property, encouraging any who might have a need to take what they will. His mother takes him to visit once, and the rambunctious creatures are like nothing he’s ever seen. They roll like beasts but keep their human form. Their Queen is known as ‘Alpha’, and they find his pale skin, slow movements, and quiet demeanor fascinating, apparently.

\--

When the Huntress sets the fae’s garden ablaze, the forest casually snuffs it out, closes her exit, and swallows her whole. The wolf Queen is grateful and promises on her bloodline to grow a garden even bigger than it had been.

She isn’t one to break her promises.

\--

Stiles’ mother is Queen of their forest, and her death at the hands of the Huntress’ clan calls upon a fury seldom known to Man. Stiles enters the Man’s town in vengeance. People stop to watch him pass, in his disguise of a young human child with shorter hair than he’s used to and eyes the color of a lukewarm sunset. Flowers and ivy grow in his footsteps and when he reaches the house of the Hunter the pathetic wards they’ve set up shatter with one wave of his hand.

His mother was weak from the beast leaching her power to stay sealed, but he was not. He was King of the Fae, son of Claudia the Fae Queen and a Nemeton of power, and he would not run from a cowardly human.

He approaches without fear; the only weapons that could harm him were skies away, in his mother’s old vaults. He doesn’t flinch when the humans take aim: they all miss, and his fae’s presence at his back gives him strength.

The grass and bushes of the human’s front yard weave together gratefully for him into a flowering wicker throne. His people surge into the building, searching for what he has come for, and soon they return with her: the Hunter’s descendant, young and vulnerable and terrified of him and his kind. She scratches at the one who carries her, but freezes when she looks into his eyes. Her sire calls out for her, voice carrying on the breeze to him, and from the innards of the den a mortal woman’s voice shrieks.

“As you have taken from me,” he breathes, and caresses the girl’s face gently, “I shall take from you.”

And they are gone, back to the soil and peace of their realm, with nothing but the wicker throne and a young child’s absence to prove his kingdom ever touched the Hunter’s.

\--

The child roams well under his trees, once she realizes he has no intention of allowing any harm to her. He explains what he had done to her when she asks: an exchange, something precious from him and something precious from her parents. There is no pain in death for his mother, and thus there should be no pain in life for her.

\--

The next week is spent introducing her: to the Hale Pack and their Queen, to the sprites and nymphs who would be her protectors while she was with them, to the human Sheriff, who occasionally came by to visit and address any miscommunications between the humans and the fae. Once the Man and the wolves saw the girl’s guaranteed safety and heard the terms of his oath, they agreed to leave her with him and his people, though he also was made to agree to allow her to return home once a month to visit her mortal parents.

\--

The first visit doesn’t go too well. The Hunter and Huntress had called their father to take the little girl back, who by now had learned never to speak her true name and went by many other things: Child, for fae were often bad with human genders and the idea of such rules; Squirrel, for her ability to climb the trees like a dryad; Beastling, for her wild nature but tame personality with those she liked. Stiles took her himself to the Hunter’s den and knelt before her to tell her quietly, “It is for one night only, beastling. However, should you need me or want to come home, you need only touch the earth and call me to you, and I will come.” She already knew any of his people would assist her, and that the wolves in the woods were good for hiding with, but should she need him he would always be there.

Her sire and dam stand trembling on the stairs as she nods and presses a child’s kiss to his pale cheek. The woman calls out a name, a name that no longer truly belongs to his little beastling, and she trots up the walk to enter the dwelling with them.

In the window, an older human stares out at him with eyes that devour, and Stiles allow his people to stand sentry outside the dwelling’s perimeter, as per his agreement with the Sheriff, while he Steps back to his kingdom in the forest.

\--

Apparently she is not willing to eat the meat they’ve cooked, nor does she like how the old Hunter smells, and when they look away for a moment she is slipped out to the yard and dancing with her nixie guards. At one point during the night they attempt to tuck her into her old bed but she resists, begging to sleep outside in the grass like she’s used to now, and when the old Hunter tries to tell her stories about the viciousness of the fae, she tells him stories of the dryads in the trees and the crows with three eyes that tell riddles and the nixies that parade on the creek’s edge and play tag with her when she asks. She tells him of the Fae King seated on a wicker throne, aged by their standards but young by his, of the Queen killed by the humans and how something taken demands something given in return, and as the old Man grows stiff and predatory she tells him of the wolves in the woods who run with her sometimes, when her King deems it safe.

O, how quiet he becomes.

And when he grabs her and demands to know where she’d seen these fae, how they’d gotten to her King’s little clearing by the great, wide Nemeton, she screams like Stiles’ banshee friend had taught her, loud and scared and earth-shattering. Human feet pound up the stories, desperate for their child, but she has jerked away from the frightening old Hunter and leaped for the potted flowers on her windowsill. She has dug her fingers into the loam and called his name, and when they reach the door she is gone and the fae are howling on the lawn in defense of their King’s little Oath-kin.

And she is safe in his arms, quivering little body tucked into his neck as they sit together on his wicker throne, eating berries and chestnuts until she calms.

\--

When the Sheriff comes to see the little beastling and hears her story of the night: how they tried to feed her cooked meat and wouldn’t let her play with her friends outside or sleep with nature (“as nature intended it,” She declares proudly, and the Sheriff stifles a snort of amusement), and how at night the old Man who smelled wrong told her mean stories and made fun of her friends, and when she told him the _real_ version he grabbed her arms and scared her so badly she didn’t ever want to go back.

She growls instead of crying, which is a well-learned skill for one so young, because tears, like names and blood, can be hoarded and used against you.

“And he smells like blood and weird stuff,” She says to him seriously. “I don’t think he likes the wolves very much, Stiles,” and the Sheriff is knowledgeable about fae, because he stiffens at the casual address of the King of them.

Stiles laughs into his little beastling’s hair.

O, she will be a terror when she can control those senses of hers.

\--

Under the stars, he stands beside the Sheriff and despite the foot of height  difference between them they are both watching the same little human girl dance with pixies by the bramble bushes. When she tires, she will lay down to sleep beneath the fae moon, and in the morning she will get up and chase down her breakfast.

“Some of you,” says the Fae King to the Man, “stand closer to the veil than others. You and my young beastling, you reach out to brush that veil with your fingertips, while others draw away, frightened of what they cannot understand.”

\--

As his beastling grows through the years, she allows the visits with her dam and sire only so long as the old Hunter does not come. Stiles is sure this grates at the Man’s nerves, but there is no doubt it is what she wants and so the Hunter is sent away again.

In the fall of her fourteenth year, she begins to run into town with an entourage, to gawk at the humans she meets and grants gifts to babies. As Oath-kin of their King, the fae obey her word, and she never gifts children with something they don’t deserve. She is a wild terror to the Men and Stiles’ people follow her example gleefully. They are bound by the rule of their King and as thus are not violent or malevolent, but trickery can be its own fun.

As she spends time in his court seated in his lap on his wicker throne, his little beastling absorbs his magic and gains the fae’s longevity and beauty. She grows angular and tall, towering over the Men in the town like the human Amazons. She catches the eye of many humans, but her training in weapons and general disinterest in the curiosities of another’s flesh keeps them away, buzzing about her like maggots to a carcass.

\--

Humans begin to come to their little town to see the Fae King and his Oath-kin daughter parade gracefully through the town amidst their mischievous entourage. Tourism rates spike briefly, before news of the locals’ exhaustion, stress, and upset over the strangers swarming their town reaches the King and he applies a barrier to keep them out.

\--

Her sire and dam never give up trying to reach her, trying to take her.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Always willing to answer questions. :)


End file.
